Beam Me Up...

It's so weird. I stepped onto the transporter, fell "asleep", and the next thing I knew I was in Bangkok. On TV it always looked so fast as they dematerialized and then reappeared somewhere else almost instantaneously. In Thailand it took 11 hours and my body is feeling the effects. The bus was amazing however and the attendant served drinks, snacks and a moist towlette at the end of the ride. The only problem was that I had to sleep with a man last night to make it happen. And listen, kudos to all the women of the world. Sleeping with a man absolutely sucks. I mean, most Thais are really thin even though there are food stalls every 15 feet or so on every street in the country. Anytime you want a bowl of noodles or a plate of rice or mystery meat on a stick, you don't have to go far to find it. So how is it that everyone is so thin? Everyone except Jabba the Hut sitting next to me. It must take him forever to go places as he has to be stopping at every one of these stalls to grow this big. He's actually not that huge. I'm just being mean after a long night of snoring and oozing onto my seat. At one point I almost elbowed him hard in the ribs and yelled "Hey Stinky, shut the hell up and get back onto your seat if you can fit in it!" But I didn't, as losing face in Thailand is not something done lightly. Being a good steward of my good nation I sat quietly and hated him in a seething molten pool of hatred and disgust. Let me explain. It's 7am and I've been up almost all night so I've earned this rant.
First of all there was the way that this guy slowly encroached into my space. I first noted the warmth of his sking through my clothes and was really creeped out by the fact that somehow his flank had seeped under my right ass-cheek. "Like liquid", I thought, "he is spilling onto my seat!" Then his left arm started to rest on mine as the chain-sawing of his open mouth startled me from non-sleep to full awakeness. There is only one guy on the bus snoring, why god... But that wasn't the worst of it...by far. I wasn't going to yell "stinky" for nothing. This guys breath had me leaning my head as far as out into the isle as I could and my neck still has that "slept wrong on it all night" feeling. The sheer lack of oxygen was bad enough but the stench that emitted from that hole! It was a mixture of old cigar breath, a beer drank maybe an hour ago, and fish. Really. I sat there and had the time to figure it out like a wine-taster discerning the specific "nose" of some horrid liquid brewed at the local slaughterhouse. Then someone behind me broke out some durian fruit roll-up and started chewing away on it. Back in Malaysia I met a very sweet retired couple who gave me a bite of their durian fruit roll-up. "The good stuff, from Thailand" they assured me. They were dying to see my reaction I could tell. Durian fruit is amazing. If you've never had it then you've missed the experience of eating a solid fart. From the first bite the sensation hits from deep inside your nasal passage like wasabe mustard. But instead of the hot pain of wasabe you get the smell/taste of a fart (someone elses mind you) that stays with you long after you swallow. The old couple laughed as I smiled weakly and lied "not bad". "Westerners think it taste like toilet" he said said to his wife and they laughed even harder. As the durian gas filled the bus I was almost grateful. But it didn't actually hide the halitosis of Jaba, it just added another layer to the cacophany of odors.
It was then that I came up with the idea of dropping a breath mint into his guano-emitting cave of a mouth. A tic-tac might do it, but being rather small it might go down his trachea and deep into a lung. More than the ensuing coughing fit resulting from such and act, I worried that a tic-tac lodged deep in a lung would do absolutely nothing about his breath. "A mento's, my kingdom for a Mento's". If that got lodged in his airway it would stick in the trachea and kill him. I smiled at the thought. Suddenly I remembered that I had bought some Juicyfruit gum at the bus station! I pulled out the pack and shoved several pieces into my mouth and for 15 joyous minutes all I could smell was gum. I laughed thinking of William Shattner overacting into his communicator. "Scotty... Scotty, get me out of here Scotty!"